Your Feedback – How much does it mean to the business?

The other day, kids had ordered some pizza at home. Upon it’s delivery, the delivery personnel, “Sir! My name is so and so from Swiggy. Please rate the delivery experience in the app and give us your feedback please. Thanks sir”

After each and every Ola journey, their app automatically beams ups the customer survey form. It takes about somewhere between 30 seconds and 1 minute to answer that survey. Nicely designed survey form! You won’t spending a lot of your time to fill out the form.

This is what my college-mate Usha Rangarajan, Founder & Managing Consultant, Unleash has emphasized in her article “Ms. Customer, here is my satisfaction form”. The design matters. The customer survey process/ form shouldn’t be tedious for the customers to fill out.

Actually, these feedbacks, surveys or the reviews are all different shades of the same thing; i.e., ‘your experience with that particular business’; ‘whether your experience with the business had been pleasant or not so pleasant’; ‘if pleasant – what made it so special for you’; ‘if itsn’t the case – then what went wrong’.

For us, the desis, giving feedback is either keeping mum or blasting off that employee or that business out of this universe. For example, if you look at a product review in any of the online shopping portals like Amazon, Flipkart et al, at the least, there would be some reviews. But for industrial machinery shops, if you visit their Google reviews, one may find hardly any reviews. Talking of Google reviews, we visit so many places, businesses which all can be reviewed there. But we choose not to do so. Just because, we don’t have time for these things. Period!

Sometimes, these reviews, feed backs might sound so good to be true. We’ve take them with a pinch of salt. But in the US of America, the “Yelp” app cuts down on those suspicious & so good to be true reviews, citing those particular reviews might’ve been generated by the that particular business owner him/herself in a dubious manner. My another college-mate Jayaraman who owns a couple of restaurants in CA, rues this particular algo of Yelp, saying that some genuine reviews by his guests are cut out by Yelp, just because his guests keep praising him lavishly by addressing his name.

Talking of generating reviews in a dubious manner, I’m reminded of “The Shed at Dulwich” (Thanks Krish for the link). Does it ring a bell? I ain’t gonna give away much but this particular UK restaurant – which never served a meal to any customer – had managed to come up as numero uno on trip advisor’s “Best 10 Restaurants in London”. Isn’t it something really funny? To read about it, here we go… The Shed at Dulwich.

Almost like an MLM scam, right? Actually, these MLMs, Emu sc(heme/am)s, et al are built upon a frenzied chains of feedback which are generally generated by the business owners themselves in order to con the public.

So, we can derive that while these feedback have the ability to make a business, they do have the ability to break it too.

Finally, coming back to the point, what do these businesses need from us in the name of customer survey? Nothing else but a fair and plain assessment of the experience we’ve had with them. They need our perspective on how they conduct business so that they can emphatically improve upon their service. Having a 35-years experience with the hospitality aka service aka hotel aka what not industries, a fair and cool-headed assessment would be win-win for both the customers and businesses.

By the way, all good things must come to an end and this article is also seeing its concluding lines. I know.. I know.. Your mind voices are going like, “Hey Babu! Idhu ennaa good-aa?”nnu. Don’t worry guys and gals, please share your feedback in the comments section below. Don’t be shy! So that you and your reviews will find a place in the history along with this PuligEsi (VaralaaRu mukkiyam, amaicharae! dialogue)

C U!

P.S: I know that I’m off a bit of myself on this article. Trying to connect too many dots and missing a few! But please, do share your comments!